Today, my guest is artist, teacher, composer, performer, singer, storyteller, and now author, Julie Kabat, whose first book is Love Letter from Pig, My Brother’s Story of Freedom Summer, just out from University Press of Mississippi. Listen in and read along as we discuss how to use family letters to write memoir, and so much more.
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Julie: Thank you for having me, Marion.
Marion: Well, I’m going to set this up for our listeners. This is such a compelling story, but we need a little background. It’s the summer of 1964, the year the FBI found the smoldering remains of the station wagon that James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman had been driving before their disappearance.
That same summer, your beloved brother, Luke, arrived as a volunteer teacher for the Mississippi Summer Project. He was one of more than 700 volunteers from the North who assisted Black civil rights activists and clergy to challenge white supremacy in the nation’s most segregated state.
This became known as Freedom Summer. Your brother survived it, but tragically died only two years after it, leaving behind letters, diaries, and essays of his time there. But possibly the most indelible inheritance was the impact his life had on you. So, let’s start there. Could you please give us a sense of you at the time of the loss of your brother?
Julie: At that time, I was 19 years old. I was finishing my second year of college, and I wanted to follow in my brother’s footsteps and also become a medical doctor, as he had. And he was in medical school at the time, and the last thing that I expected during my spring semester was to hear toward the end of it that he was ill.
My whole world just crumbled, and immediately, just within the next couple of days, my family gathered out in the West Coast, everyone except my sister, who was in Paris at the time. And I was able to spend about a week with my brother, and then I left thinking that my husband and I, because I had married early, that we were going to go back and spend the summer with him, but we never had the chance to do that. He died just six weeks after he was diagnosed.
Marion: So, I wanted to set that up so that people understand, because so many people have stories that they want to go back and get, and this is the case here. And I work with memoir writers all day long, and regularly someone comes to me with papers, letters, or ephemera from family and simply want to publish as is.
And it doesn’t work, of course, since we can’t contextualize the letters, emails, poems, correspondence of others. And it’s a hard thing that I must tell them that you must curate from the material and form a story. So, you’ve given us a profile of who you were when your brother died. Talk to us about the moments, the stops, and goes, and the period from that loss to some recognition that you were going to handle this material as a writer and enter into a writer’s relationship with that story.
Julie: Wow, that’s a powerful question. So, I wasn’t thinking of writing a book, but anyone I became really close to in the intervening years would learn about my brother. He meant so much to me. We were eight years apart, but he really had taken me under his wing and mentored me and taught me.
He loved to teach. And so, I sort of carried this burden, this terrible, terrible grief forward into my life and tried to deal with it in all kinds of ways.
I became a composer. I had studied composition as a youngster, beginning to study when I was 11 years old. And when I went back to music after college, I began to compose, and sometimes I would compose music that really was about grieving in all kinds of ways, in lots of different genres. And I became a singer, studying classical voice. And a lot of my songs that I sang were about grieving and about sadness.
I hadn’t thought about writing about him until actually you did a workshop at our local library. And I had been thinking about writing. I’d been teaching children how to write, students in schools. And I wasn’t thinking of writing a memoir, but I thought, Oh, it will be interesting to go and to learn about this form of writing.
So I went as an observer. And then on the way home, so many years later, I was walking home. And I thought, if I were to write a memoir, what would I write about?
And immediately, I felt my brother’s presence. And I thought of my grandchildren and how they would never, ever know him unless I wrote about him.
Marion: It’s such a beautiful, remarkable, and oh, so real moment of when it drops into our heads. And I think people think so much that it’s some kind of spiritual – and it is experience – it’s some kind of thing that happens to other people, I guess is what I really meant to say.
But it happens to us all. Mostly, we talk ourselves out of it. When it happens to us, you know, oh, you should write a book, you should write a story. But you’re an artist, a composer, a performer, a singer, as you just said. So you’re comfortable with the outward facing public aspects of art.
But writing is so private, so at home, so done in solitude. So would you just take a wild thought about what skills you brought from your life as a musician into this life as a researcher and writer?
I mean, did any of those support you in this new pursuit that’s so solitary and personal?
Julie: Yes, very, very much. I mean, composing, you’re composing for others, and there’s the intermediaries of the performers. But it also is solitary. So I was used to that. And in my teaching, I was often facilitating a creative process in the students. And they could be anywhere from first grade to, you know, the end of high school.
And so I was used to thinking about, you know, the purpose that an author has. And often I would work with creative writing students, and we would set what they wrote through my workshops to music. So, I was used to this relationship between the voice and the word.
And I always thought of my voice as my muse. I also did storytelling. So, I had a sense of what works in terms of reaching an audience, and how to speak to people. But I hadn’t actually sat and written, you know, a book before, certainly not. I had been doing a lot of grant writing, and I was very sick and tired of that.
But I think I really did have skills that came, interestingly enough, from being a composer, being a singer, knowing the voice, knowing that an author’s purpose is so important, and also having a sense of who that audience is.
Now, when I began, I began writing for my grandchildren. I didn’t have any idea that I was going to change my mind. And I started actually with early childhood stories, which I was writing in the first person present. And I found that that brought my brother really to life. It was as if he was suddenly with me again. And I was just the kid.
So I was capturing those childhood stories. And in the back of my mind, I knew that I would need to write about his Mississippi time, but I hadn’t been there.
So I would need to take a different voice and have a different approach. But for a long time, that was off in the future. And then when I began that process, you know, that opened up a whole different world of writing for me.
Marion: And it’s a very layered story. And fascinating to me, I kept thinking about it in terms of a piece of music. And I play the piano, I understand about harmony. There’s a lot of harmony here. It’s fascinating to me. Again, the title is Love Letter from Pig, My Brother’s Story of Freedom Summer.
And it opens plainly and directly. On a napkin, your brother scribbled a letter. It was June 1964. And as you mentioned, he was studying medicine at Stanford. He was doing well, he says, even in genetics, he wrote, and he goes on to state that he’ll spend the summer in Mississippi, in short, be one of those 700 student activists.
And your parents just freaked out, called him home. And you set this up so that within two pages, we have a complex, layered set of circumstances of knowing what’s at stake: Him, his ambition, his heart, them, your family, you. And then you go into this idea that secrets function as currency in your family.
In other words, there are many stories here.
A lesser writer would have just dealt with his summer there. But the complexity of family secrets is a very deeply important part of this story. So, my audience is writers. They all have layered lives and stories.
Help them. Did you say, “Yep, it’s layered? Yep, this is hard. Yep, not even. Oh, can do I even begin to know how hard this is going to be?” Or did you start pulling apart those? I mean, the layers travel, as I said, like, like the staff in music, there’s melody in it, they engage with one another.
But damn, that was a whopping choice on your part.
Julie: Thank you. Thank you. It was not my first choice. So when I first started, and was thinking of my grandchildren, I started with the reunion. That was Freedom Summer at 50. When volunteers and who knew they were going to be there, but his former Freedom School students gathered, and they gathered at the sites all around the state.
And so when I was writing it at the beginning, I was starting with that process of my research, you know, and how I had gone and suddenly this world was opening up to me, of people who knew him and loved him, knew him as children, worked with him, you know, the other volunteers as adults.
And then, as I continued, actually, it was the day after Donald Trump had been elected in 2016, that I sat down to write, still working on the version for my grandchildren. And I thought to myself, “No, this is a much bigger story. Our world needs this story now.”
And I pulled the whole thing apart, ripped it up, and started over. And I thought, Okay, what’s going to bring the audience in? And what is the part where I was present, the part I knew best? And upstairs, in a pile of old papers, I had found this letter written on a napkin.
And I had the original. And so, I knew of that letter. But I just began the whole book with that.
And of course, that brought him home. And my parents were freaking out. And I was 17. And I was watching this beloved brother of mine, you know, fight with my parents about going to Mississippi, and was he going to be safe or not.
And then while he was home, suddenly the news of the murders, or the disappearance, it wasn’t known as murders at first. But the disappearance of three civil rights workers came on the television. And I, who only supported my brother, saw that maybe my parents also had a point.
Marion: Yes, of course they did. Everybody has a point here. And it’s fascinating, because we get to know everybody. And to get back to something you said a moment ago about the first election of Donald Trump, we’re just post-election 2024, as I interview you, and the reader feels that none of the issues that you look at in this book have been resolved.
Here we are in 2024. So this book very much exists in the here and now as well. And I found that to be fascinating.
And staying with that idea of layers, family history is a huge part of this story. And you present, as I said, your brother, the medical student at Stanford, leaving the safety of Palo Alto.
And he is very much echoing a role in your own father’s life, who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era for refusing to fire other blacklisted doctors, right? And the family was forced to get work and did, they had to move to get work, and they moved to Rhode Island, where they were met by antisemitism.
So, there’s a great arc of the tale of America, and I’d like you to talk to me a bit about feeling the pulse of that in your own story, recognizing that the antisemitism that you bonded with your brother over, that was real in your parents experience in Rhode Island, that hasn’t gone away.
When did you feel that and realize, my goodness, this story is also about now?
Julie: I think I knew from the beginning that the story was about now, because at the time it felt that we had gotten so far. I mean, so many, the Great Society, you know, existed and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Those were really outcomes of Freedom Summer and the nation waking up to our long-term and continuing racism.
So, I knew that the story still exists because we haven’t begun to address all the ways that African Americans are oppressed. And then as I began writing and working and, you know, thinking of each section and ripping it apart again, I discovered that I loved rewriting.
It became clear to me that, you know, when we moved to Rhode Island, for the first year we were in Providence and then we moved to the country. And I really grew up from the age of 10 in Plum Beach, which was right on the Narragansett Bay in just a gorgeous summertime beach community where people didn’t stay during the winter, so it was isolating.
And then when I did meet children of my own age during that first summer, I was really excited and especially by my one friend, Judy Atkins. And the girls invited me down to a private beach club that was not far from our home. And then Judy came to tell me a few days later, “They don’t want you down there.
The mothers say, you can come down to our beach club three times this summer, otherwise it will cause too much of a stir.”
And my brothers, both of them, they rallied around me to make a joke out of it. And we planned a swim in, so we never executed it.
Marion: How radical.
Julie: But the sit-ins in the South had started. And so we were inspired by that.
Marion: It’s wonderful. That’s just wonderful.
You know, making this book work required real discernment between sentimentality and sentiment. Mere sentimentality would undermine the impact of the tale. You must portray your brother in ways that make him real to us, not merely telling us what a great guy he was, but by showing the impact he had on the world.
And he, like others who volunteered and were jailed and who died, who engaged in courageous nonviolence against the exploitation of black Americans in rural Mississippi. But that’s hard when you adore your older brother, to not merely be sentimental.
Did you wrestle with the emotional work of keeping your emotions in, what, check? I mean, it’s, you’re very controlled, — loving, adoring, absolutely, but reportorial more than sentimental. Did you take out language? Did you talk to yourself about how not to just gush all over the page about him?
How did you handle that?
Julie: Well, I understood, I think, from the beginning that writing is about showing and not telling. And so I had to let the relationship between me and my brother and my thoughts about him reflect the story that I was telling. And the main thing I felt was the incredible eloquence of his letters, but also the fact that his letters and his diaries were written in a moment when he was confronting his own conscience and thinking about his own experience and how could he remain nonviolent in the face of so much violence in Mississippi that summer.
I mean, it was just, what was going on was horrifying. So, I think I am not a sentimental person, and so that probably was easier.
I did have to hold my emotions in check, and there were times, you know, that I would let go of the writing and let myself cry and then come back to it.
And I know you’ve said in other podcast interviews, you know, that you have to be careful about reverence, that there can’t be too much of it. I think in some ways I was allowing myself to have a lot of reverence for my brother because, you know, I had different roles in the story.
So I’m the narrator at my current age, but I was also the child, and then I was the teenager, and then I was the person recovering from his death. So there were these different stages of my life, and that place where Luke connected with me and I was younger, I think I was able to have that reverence in my child’s voice because I absolutely adored him, and that was very authentic to telling the story.
But it wasn’t about becoming sentimental. It was, you know, what were the conversations we had? What were the questions? How did he provoke me? How did I see him fighting for his rights against my mother or my father? You know, there were real issues to grapple with.
Marion: Yes. Yes, there were. And when we write about those issues, when we write about the past or from the past, and you just made the very good point that you write about yourself in different stages of your life, but when we write from the past, writing particularly about race, writing from here and now, we encounter the crisis of language itself.
Words that we no longer use are both milestones as well as millstones around the neck of a writer trying to write for a place of awareness about a time when awareness was only forming.
So, talk to me about the dilemma. When you open the book with a really strong understanding and acknowledgement about the dilemma of language and how you cope with the original documents and the language used in it, your brother’s journals, letters in particular, and writing from here and now, this stops a lot of writers.
They say, well, we can’t write about that because we don’t use that language. And yet here it is, here’s my brother’s letter. He uses that word that we don’t use anymore, whatever the word is having to do with someone. So, talk to me about how you, you produce that opening section in which you say, “Yes, some of this language, these are original documents, I’m going to deal with it.”
But that’s a dilemma. It stops a lot of writers. How, why didn’t it stop you?
Julie: Well, I mean, I didn’t want to change his letters. So I had no choice but to use the old terms. But then I had to explain, you know, I, people don’t understand the history, whether they’re too young or they didn’t pay attention at the time it was happening.
So many of us don’t know the history and the changes in the language. And so, I wanted to write a preface, an introduction, that would explain some of the history so that the book itself wouldn’t get overburdened with the history. And then a history of the changes in the language seemed to be so important.
And of course, our language nowadays just keeps changing and it’s part of the difficulty as we bump up against people who don’t want things to change. So I wanted to explain how over the years, you know, whether you were not capitalizing words or you were capitalizing words and what you were using, that these are like footprints in time.
And the words change as much as the history changes. And we have to be sensitive to that.
But I think what also helped me was that in my days as a teaching artist, I would do these long-term residencies. And for many years, I was a resident composer, performer, teacher of writing at the Arbor Hill School in Albany, New York, which was predominantly African American.
It was a very settled, for the most part, settled community. And so, I was meeting those students and over the years, I really wanted to allow the students in the older grades, up to sixth grade, to write in street language. And Linda Jackson Chalmers was this magnificent principal who’s African American.
And she would say to me, “No, no, I want the students to learn proper English.” And then one year, she finally said to me, “You can do one workshop, just one, where you allow the students to write in street language.” And they did. And they wrote about different things because they were using the language that they would use in streets and at home.
The language that they grew up with that was most familiar to them. And then afterwards, I always read some of their poems back to them. But in certain cases, I couldn’t because they were using a word that was not right for me to be saying. And so I said to the teacher, Jan Williams, who is also African American, “Why don’t you read these poems?”
And then let’s have a discussion about why I could not read those words. And anyway, afterwards, the students were so puzzled, they were just completely puzzled. And it took a long time till finally, one of the students, a sixth grader, said, “If you had read that, you would have sounded like a racist.”
And it was the most interesting discussion. And in preparing to have them do that, I wrote, I read a book on Black English. So having had that kind of back and forth and discussion with the students themselves, I had a sense of how language gets used and misused and changes and how we need to be sensitive to what those changes are.
But I certainly didn’t want to interfere with the flow of my own brother’s writing.
Marion: And you don’t. And it’s a beautiful book. And I thank you so much for writing it and for teaching us today about how to do so. I know everybody listening will benefit and move more freely into their own work. Thank you, Julie. That was just delightful.
Julie: Thank you so much. Thank you, Marion. It was wonderful to talk with you about it.
Marion: The author is Julie Kabat. See more on her at Julie Kabat dot com. The book is Love Letter from Pig, My Brother’s Story of Freedom Summer, just out from the University Press of Mississippi. Get it wherever books are sold. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Jacqueline Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey.
Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project, where writers get their needs met through online classes in how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts, and listen to it wherever you go.
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